HOT TIP: Watch for Worms

Here, as a holiday present, are some rules to help you succeed in business. Hopefully, they'll help you chart a successful route through that land called "dot-conomy."

(No, they're not original. The Gartner Group, a leading consulting firm, issued them last August, but they drew little attention then; now, when the bloom is fading a bit, maybe they'll be of more interest.)

1. Never plan more than 24 months ahead. Technology and markets change so quickly that the traditional five-year forecast is useless. Gartner suggests that any strategy that takes more than a year to execute probably will fail.

2. Don't try to plan an electronic business strategy independent of your overall business strategy. Don't mistake tactics for strategy. Your e-business has to be part of your total business.

3. Use separate strategies according to industry, geography and culture. That's not a contradiction of Rule 2; it simply means that different parts of your business may operate differently in the electronic world and you must adjust to that to meet specific market needs.

4. Give equal weight to internal and external processes. Don't let the "business-to-business" and "business-to-consumer" jargon upset your analysis. Distribution is still distribution, regardless of electronic intervention; such things as procurement and cost controls don't change because of labels.

5. Keep your board on board. That's more than just getting approval for the expenditures - it means giving board members a plan that defines specific objectives and helps board members understand how to measure progress. Make sure the board understands that these measurements may differ from traditional profit and loss standards.

6. Explore alternatives to help your company achieve its e-business goals. That may include doing things you've never done before - hiring skills from outside rather than developing them in-house or spinning off a business unit to provide independence or financial incentives.

7. Play by the "new" rules. Adjust to what your competitors are doing, whether it's advertising or price discounting. The rules may be different in the electronic world than they were in conventional business.

8. Keep after your distribution system. Distribution channels - suppliers, business partners, deliveries to customers - are going to have to be fast and effective. Get rid of those which don't measure up; reward those which perform best.

9. Create a program to measure effectiveness of your e-business venture. It doesn't matter whether you use traditional standards, such as profitability, or "modern" ones, such as market share, or new ones, such as "stickiness" (the ability to retain visitors on a Web site). Just make sure your measures are clear, reflect what's really going on and make sense.

10. Be fast and ruthless. You can't be either right or fast - you have to be both. Red tape and corporate bureaucracy will kill electronic business - make sure your managers have the authority and ability to move quickly to get things done.

And there you have it - ten things your good company is probably doing already, although you may not have thought about it in the clear fashion presented by Gartner.

So have a happy holiday and get ready for a better new year.

Viruses continue to be active. A year-old virus called "Kriz" has resurfaced, due to its ability to piggyback on other viruses.

Antivirus maker Symantec posted a free tool to scan for and remove the virus. It said Kriz spreads when someone opens an infected file. It changes the basic operating system and also infects other programs, with the possibility it could then spread throughout networks.

The biggest danger will come Dec. 25, when Kriz may overwrite all files on a computer and then try to erase the basic input-output (BIOS) function.

Private e-mails circulating on the Internet are warning of another dangerous new virus called "Wobbler."

The messages quote both IBM and AOL as having issued warnings about the virus, which comes in an e-mail titled "California." The messages also warn about opening any message that says, "Win a Holiday." In either case, the warnings say, opening those messages will unleash a virus which will wipe out a hard drive and also may destroy either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer.

The warnings also caution against opening anything with "Pretty Park" in the name. Pretty Park and its variations surfaced last fall but apparently are recurring now.

SecureAgent Software is now a registered trademark.

The U.S. Patent Office issued the registration Dec. 5 for "Software Secured With SecureAgent" including the padlock identification. That designation, with the "r" to indication trademark registration, will now be used on SecureAgent products and materials.

A hacker who tried to extort money from an Internet credit card company exposed 55,000 numbers when his demand was refused.

The victim was Creditcards.com, a Los Angeles-based affiliate of Humboldt Bank in Eureka, Calif. The act occurred "some time ago," a spokesman said, but was just reported recently.

The hacker apparently became angry when the company refused his demands for money. He then broke into the company's Web site and exposed about 55,000 credit card numbers on the Internet.

The company contacted the FBI, which is investigating. The company declined further comment.

Mark India as the next hot market for the computer industry.

The number of personal computers sold in that country is zooming. It will hit five million this month, according to the magazine Dataquest, and is expected to double, to 10 million, by 2003.

The first PC was sold in India in 1984. Just 1,200 units were sold that year. But the number rose to one million in 1999, then jumped up this year, to 1.7 million. By 2004, Dataquest said, India will be buying five million units a year.

The magazine said falling prices and Internet-savvy users are fueling the boom.

India is rated the fastest growing Asia-Pacific market, outside of Japan.

No wonder the Russians are rated the world's top computer hackers. There's a school for hackers, which trains youngsters in computer skills.

The school's founder is Ilya Vasilyev, 27, a onetime software pirate known as "Arvi the Hacker." He holds classes in a shabby Moscow apartment.

But he contends his pupils are good guys, defending clients from viruses and computer attacks, rather than malicious hackers like those Russians who've broken into Microsoft, ransacked Pentagon systems, posted credit card numbers on the Internet and, in at least one case, stolen $12 million from a major American bank.

"A hacker can do something that influences all of mankind," Vasilyev says. "Every country, every company, needs hackers now. You have a feeling that you can do anything. You don't have that in any other job."

The school has operated since 1996. Several hundred teenagers have sharpened skills there.

Vasilyev says, "I won't take a student when I see they have a criminal tendency. A hacker must be a wise person, like a samurai or a karate master. You have to use all of your wisdom not to harm people."

The temptations, however, are great. Even highly skilled computer specialists earn only a few hundred dollars a month in Russia. Illegal hacking, including pirating software, can be much more lucrative.

"Piracy is prospering and nobody is fighting it," says Sergei Pokrovsky, 25, editor of a hacker magazine that has gained 50,000 circulation in just two years.

Drexel University plans to make its campus wireless. The Philadelphia school has required students to have personal computers since 1983, but now it's changing its university network to be wireless.

"We can't be limited by wires hooked into wall plugs," said President Constantine Papadakis.

Computers will use adapter cards - which cost $175 - and transmit encoded radio signals. The cards connect to small antennas mounted around the campus.

"You're not confined to just a classroom or just a dorm room," said John A. Bielec, vice president for information resources and technology.

There's a cybercrime center on the Internet.

A combination of federal agencies created the Internet Fraud Complaint Center. It's at: www.ifccfbi.gov

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno called it "that stop on the information superhighway where law enforcement and consumers can meet and make the roads safer for us all."

She said Americans filed nearly 18,000 complaints about Internet fraud last year.

The new center will deal with everything from get-rich-quick fraud schemes to bogus auctions and undelivered merchandise bought on the Web.

It will help consumers file complaints and provide information about schemes and tactics.

Watch out for the new worms. They seem harmless - and you may not even know they're in your computer - but they can upgrade themselves and can in some cases launch attacks on other systems.

The newest worms include Hybris, MTX, Bymer, Sonic and XTC. Initially, they don't bring any destructive payloads with them, unlike the "Love Bug" virus which swept through computers earlier in the year.

But they have the potential to be enlisted by a malicious user to launch messages to a target Internet site and possibly shut it down - the "denial of service" assaults that hit Yahoo, Amazon and others.

Digital Service Line (DSL) and cable modem subscribers are most vulnerable, because those links are always on. Users may not even notice outbound traffic generated by the worms from their systems, unless they're using some security software which monitors messages.

Dialup modem users may get an error message when they try to log on to the Internet.

Users should keep anti-virus programs up to date and check their machines regularly for such bugs.

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